Merc #1: A Bloody Sci-Fi Tale

Merc #1 kicks off the new series from Zenescope Entertainment, fol­low­ing Sonny Grissom, a mer­ce­nary whose cyber­netic upgrades are destroy­ing his body. Despite his phys­i­cal con­di­tion, Sonny is still in the game and when a woman rep­re­sent­ing the CDC shows up with a six-hundred-grand job retriev­ing a courier with stolen mer­chan­dise, he’s eager enough to take it. Unfortunately Booth, who sells organs and other body parts to the rich while har­vest­ing his wares from any­one unfor­tu­nate enough to get in his way, also seems to have an inter­est in the courier and what­ever it is the CDC is try­ing to get back.
 
Scripted by Jerrold E. Brown, this comic mostly reminds me of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Sonny’s friend and part­ner, Buddha, jacks into a net­work via a plug in his head (think Matrix), while Sonny’s cyber­net­ics pump him full of drugs. For the most part, Merc offers pretty stan­dard science-fiction fare, although the one thing I do find strange is that Buddha refers to the CDC as “the angels,” accus­ing Sonny of try­ing to make amends before he dies by work­ing for them. This would make the CDC one of the few gov­ern­ment agen­cies— I assume they’re gov­ern­ment, it’s not entirely explained yet— in science-fiction his­tory to wear an angel­i­cally white hat.
 

The art of Merc, pro­vided by Daniel Schneider, works well with the story. There are a few pan­els where char­ac­ter posi­tion­ing is an issue, but there are also detailed, strik­ing pan­els that help build the mood of Merc. I could have han­dled a lit­tle less gore, but this book prob­a­bly wouldn’t live up to expec­ta­tions with­out it.
 
Check back for an inter­view with Merc artist and Canadian Daniel Schneider.